This was supposed to be the year of the MDMA revolution. About this time last year, prescription MDMA looked like a sure thing. After decades of clinical research, political wrangling, and aggressive promotion, the popular underground club drug was set to be tamed and medicalized, with a stamp of approval from the US Food and Drug Administration. Then, it wasn’t. In a stark change of course, the FDA rejected the MDMA therapy it had been considering by a 10-1 vote. The decision derailed psychedelic medicine for the foreseeable future. Except for one thing—an unexpected lifeline from the Trump administration. In May, the FDA’s new commissioner, surgical oncologist Marty Makary, appeared on cable news to declare MDMA and other Schedule 1 narcotics “a top priority for this FDA and this administration.” Elsewhere, Mr. MAHA himself, the US Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has spoken positively about the psychoactive stems-and-bark tea ayahuasca. Matt Zorn, a lawyer recently appointed to RFK Jr.’s department, had previously fought the US government to allow access to cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms. Casey Means, Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, has spoken of the benefits of psilocybin-assisted therapy, claiming that psychedelic mushrooms helped her find love and made her feel like “part of an infinite and unbroken series of cosmic nesting dolls.” Psychedelic medicine, as it turns out, slots rather comfortably into the burn-it-all ethos of RFK Jr.’s movement. But as MDMA’s advocates regroup to take advantage of this surge of support, they’re also reckoning with why they failed to win over the FDA—and whether a second attempt could go better. Could the psychedelic world’s new Trumpworld allies be the ones who finally help it achieve its goal? Photograph: Tonje Thilesen For almost half a century, American psychedelic medicine—and MDMA in particular—has had one indispensable advocate: Rick Doblin. On a cool December morning, I met Doblin at his bright purple craftsman home in the Boston suburbs. Dressed in a well-worn chamois shirt and khakis and with a wiry tangle of hair, he was cheery and avuncular. His look was classic New England and a bit bedraggled, befitting the scion of a wealthy industrialist family turned elder statesman of the counterculture.